With the help and development of modern technological advances in the 21st century, I.T. professionals across the globe are transforming the way things work. With the outbreak of COVID-19 pandemic, the demand for new ways to work has simply boomed.
Did you know that the estimated video market reach for enterprises has been estimated to touch $25 billion by 2025? On doing a little math, you will notice that this number counts for more than a 20% growth rate.
What is Live Streaming?
Not only the office-going and the professionals are making use of live streaming solutions but also the gamers and entertainers are using these software to broadcast their content across the globe.
Live streaming or live video streaming is a method used for transforming video data over the internet. Describing it in a much more technical way, it’s all about delivering a video file over the internet in a bit a timely manner.
Mostly, live video streaming is done from a remote and isolated location. The best part about live streaming is that the end-user would not have to download the entire video to play it on their personal devices. They don’t have to face technical roadblocks in playing videos online, such as codex errors, file type errors, and so on.
Popularly known as live broadcasting, live video streaming allows a lot of end-users and viewers to play videos over the internet in real-time. No need to record a video or waste your internet data by downloading and storing a ton of different video files.
In modern times, most TV broadcasters, video game streamers, and social media influencers are making full use of some of the best live video streaming software. Professional educators, such as distance teachers and institutes can make use of live video streaming software for educational purposes.
Many people tend to confuse themselves with terms like video streaming and regular streaming. The key difference is easily understandable with the popular example of an actor reciting a monologue.
When an actor has to recite a monologue that he or she has memorized, it would be called an example of regular streaming. But when the same actor is improvising a speech in real-time, it would be called a true example of live streaming.
In the former example, the core content, or a video in our case, is stored and then transmitted over a network whereas, in the latter example, the content is being transmitted in real-time, without anything being stored, captured, memorized, or recorded anywhere at any time.
Live Streaming Software: An Overview
Generally, when anybody refers to a “live streaming software” they are referring to an encoding software program. What’s important is that one should first understand what an encoder is. For what we call live streaming, it is important to have a real-time video encoder.
An encoder is a software program that converts video data input into a digital, streamable format.
It allows the live video to be streamed available and playable on multiple different kinds of devices. The market and the online industry are packed with tons of encoders developed across the globe.
The best part is that modern and 21st-century encoders are integrated with a lot of amazing functions that allow streamers and live encoders to perform a lot of different things easily.
Gone are the days when encoders could only just convert and send videos to a live stream. This is where the term “live streaming software” has emerged.
The internet is packed with a ton of blogs and articles that talk about different kinds of hardware and software encoders. What most people don’t know is that live-streaming software encoders range in a lot of different categories.
This categorization is based on the level and kind of complexities. From the free ones to some of the most robust and the simplest to use, live streaming software is available in a lot of different categories.
There are also a lot of amazing and top-grade live streaming software that is used in top-level and enterprise-grade live broadcasts. Some of them include vMix, OBS, and Wirecast, which are mostly used in live sports and TV broadcasts.
Also, some of the best live streaming and broadcasting software not only empower you to stream your videos live all around the world but also allow you to:
- Add a number of different visuals and graphics in real-time
- Make use of multiple cameras to give different perspectives to the viewers
- Integrate a number of different audio sources into the live stream
Another amazing feature is that most live–streaming platforms are available in different price ranges for different sizes of business organizations.
How Does Live Streaming Work?
There are a lot of different steps and processes involved in streaming and creating a live webinar but here are the major steps and terms that you have to keep in mind while thinking about the core of live streaming.
Capturing the Video
One of the main things you will need in a live-streaming webinar is raw video content, also called the video content captured in a video recording camera.
In very technical terms, visual information is the representation of digital visual data in 1s and 0s at the very core level.
Segmentation
Video data includes a lot of different digital information and data. In very basic terms, this would take the user a lot of time and effort to download different kinds of video files.
As compared to other file types, such as PDF or image, a video file is much heavier and takes a lot of processing power as well.
Sending complete video content over the internet at once would be very impractical. Segmenting video content after dividing it into smaller segments would help it stream it in a very quick and easy manner.
Encoding Video and Compressing It
Video compression is a very common term nowadays, especially after remote working and the popularity of the work-from-home culture. A segmented video, to be streamed, is now compressed and encoded for transmission.
A common method used around the world for video compression is the simple removal of the unwanted and redundant data present as the visual data itself.
For example, if you have a grey background continuously active in your video, the compression would eliminate the need for rendering all the subsequent frames against the same background.
You can also take the popular example of adding a piece of brand-new furniture into the space of your living room. A homeowner is not obliged to add a new chair or coffee table every time a new table or night lamp is added into the room.
What’s more economical and practical is to maintain the rough overall layout of your room and only make a few rearrangements and adjustments to the internal furniture. In a very similar way, you may not need to render each and every frame of your video for streaming.
Another common term you might have read online is “encoding”. It refers to the complete process of converting the data of a video or any kind of file into a completely new and unique format.
For particular use in live video streaming, your data has to be encoded into an interpretable digital format that is easily recognizable and playable on a variety of mobile devices, such as mobile phones, laptops, tablets, and so forth. Some of the most popular and commonly used encoding standards include HEVC, VP9, and AV1.
There are a few other additional terms and steps involved in live video streaming, such as Video Data Caching, Latency Maintenance, RTT Reduction, Video and Data Bandwidth, and so on.
Final Word
We hope our highly researched and curated guide to the world and the possibilities of Live Streaming Software platforms answers all your queries regarding the software.
Make sure you let us know if you have any other kind of query related to Live Streaming Software.
And if you are familiar with any of the available live-streaming software in the market.